Why Pilots Still Talk About the Vickers Viscount

Video from the channel Sky Source about Vickers, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 12:47. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

English-language educational video presenting the Vickers Viscount as a success story of British commercial turboprop aviation. It covers its engine, pressurised fuselage, main customers and its position against the first jet airliners.

The Viscount stems from the recommendations of the Brabazon Committee, set up during the war so that British civil aviation could compete with American aviation after the war. Its engine, the Rolls-Royce Dart, combined a two-stage centrifugal compressor with a three-stage axial turbine that also drove the propeller reduction gearbox. George Edwards discarded the double-bubble fuselage inherited from the Viking in favour of a circular one, better suited to pressurisation, and the panoramic windows had rounded corners, a lesson reinforced by the de Havilland Comet accidents. BEA asked for 32 seats instead of 24 and in August 1950 ordered 20 Viscount 701s. Capital Airlines was its American customer, although the aircraft's capacity did not fit its high-density routes. Trans-Canada Air Lines and Trans Australia Airlines operated it on shorter routes.

The video compares it with the piston airliners of the time, which it surpassed in vibration, cabin noise and maintenance, and with the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, faster and with greater capacity but more expensive. 445 Viscounts were built, and the last one left commercial service in 2009.